Living in a car isn’t exactly a sport, I’ll admit that. However, for this week I’m doing my best to try and pretend. There are only seven schools in the country competing in the Chevy Aveo Livin’ Large Challenge and our Boston University team of Allison Lavey and Jamie Williams are one of the frontrunners.
The five-day competition pits groups of college students against one another to see who can “live the largest” in a Chevy Aveo (that’s a type of car apparently), and by doing so get the most votes online and via text messages. The contest started Monday and ends this Friday at midnight.
There are a lot of things we struggle with here at BU, beating Umass-Lowell at hockey for example, but going online and sending text messages are two things we’re damn good at. This may be our best shot at a national title!
Spending a full five days in a car does have some elements of sporting events. For starters, it comes with a set of rules and regulations: Both members of the team are required to be touching the car at all times with the exception of when they have class and 10 minute bathroom breaks every other hour. The girls will be monitored at all times and escorted to and from class. Now our Terriers aren’t the only ones competing.
There are six other teams doing their own things, but really I boil it down to three serious competitors: The University of Florida, the University of Southern California and Northwestern University. Florida and USC have distinct advantages because of weather conditions. Here in Boston we may face rain multiple times during the week, while they can expect nothing but sunshine and blue skies. Northwestern had the early lead with 20 percent of the vote late in the day Monday. They seem to have a team with good advertising and promotion, although I will note that one of their members, Mario Montes Sujo, lists as one of his facts that he “loves to play with fire.” All I’m saying is that car might not last the whole five days.
But the BU girls also have to pull their weight in the daily challenges. The Day One challenge was to get as many people to touch the car at one time. BU got 56 and was still waiting to hear the results as of late Monday night. The winner of each challenge gets a reward, the first being a catered meal brought to them in the vehicle.
Then you have the playing field. For our girls, this is the parking lot across the street from Warren Towers, the one formerly known as Burger King. I suggest stopping by to watch a bit of the competition, maybe start a little “Let’s Go Terriers!” or just stand there awkwardly pretending there’s something to watch other than two girl’s sitting in a car- whatever works for you.
The girls even have their own uniforms. Every night they’ll be dawning their mighty “matching onesie PJ sets” that have “spaceships and stars that glow in the dark on them.” Maybe not as intimidating as say the silver and black of the Raiders, but it’s a uniform nonetheless.
Then there is the element of not being able to shower. Pansies in the NFL and NBA shower even at halftime. Our ladies will be allowing filth, grime and stink to accumulate for a full five days.
“Allison and I both have long hair, which probably looks cuter when we wash it, but we are tough, and we have hats,” Williams said.
Of course nothing is a sport without performance enhancing drugs. Jamie admitted to taking some Benadryl the night before the contest to help her get some sleep. Allison was too excited to sleep and resorted to calling friends studying abroad in drastically different time zones at 4:30 a.m. to calm her down.
There was a lot of other pregame preparation as well: decorating the car, buying baby wipes to wash up with and getting as much stretching in as possible. Most athletic endeavors test your ability to move, whether it’s down a field, a court or around bases. Living in a car tests your ability not to move. Think about how much weight the girls could put on in a week without any form of exercise.
The weight will be well gained if the girl’s can come out on top. The top prize is three cars: one for each of the girls and one for the university. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but if we win I’m suggesting painting the car gold and displaying it in a glass case in Agganis Arena-the ultimate national championship trophy.
One glaring difference between a “living in a car” contest and a sporting event is the impact of the fans. At a hockey game you can cheer all you want, but that cheering is not tallied up. The car contest is the exact opposite. The living that Jamie and Allison are doing in the car is not what counts at the end of the day. It’s the votes that you the fans make. It’ll be a close race in the end. Our Terriers should be right there. Every vote counts. We’ll win or lose this thing as a team.
Josh Lerner, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at jlerner@bu.edu.
